Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
dense stadium deployments
cellular uplink gap
user-perceived performance
network congestion
QoE degradation
App-Based Performance Characterization of Cellular and Wi-Fi Networks in Dense Stadium Deployments
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the severe uplink bottleneck in cellular networks within ultra-dense stadium environments, which significantly degrades web browsing and media upload quality of experience (QoE). Leveraging real-world measurements from a sold-out football game at Notre Dame Stadium, the authors conduct an end-to-end QoE evaluation across multiple operators’ 4G/5G cellular deployments—including EN-DC and 5G standalone (SA)—alongside a dense Wi-Fi network comprising 900 outdoor access points. The work quantifies, for the first time in such a realistic ultra-dense setting, a pronounced cellular “uplink gap”: under full capacity, page load failure rates reach 36.6% and image upload failures soar to 46%. In stark contrast, the localized dense Wi-Fi network demonstrates markedly superior performance, with page load failures reduced to just 3.9% and upload latency increases limited to within 2.1×, underscoring its critical role in offloading bursty uplink traffic.
📝 Abstract
The concentration of 77,622 spectators during football games at Notre Dame Stadium creates an exceptionally demanding environment for wireless infrastructure. To handle this extreme user density, the stadium deploys concurrent multi-tier networks serving outdoor users: an enterprise 5/6 GHz Wi-Fi network with ~900 outdoor Access Points (APs) alongside high-density multi-carrier 4G/5G networks powered by a neutral-host small-cell Distributed Antenna System (DAS) with up to 129 unique cell identifiers (PCIs) per operator. This study evaluates user-perceived performance and QoE across these networks using commercial smartphones to execute web browsing, WhatsApp messaging, and Instagram media posting workloads. Our empirical results reveal that while cellular networks deliver strong peak downlink performance in an empty stadium, game-day crowd loads heavily strain uplink and latency performance, triggering a severe cellular "uplink gap." Under Non-Standalone (EN-DC) anchor congestion, web browsing handshakes suffer a catastrophic 5,983 ms P90 Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB), and image upload failure rates climb to 46%. Furthermore, while narrow low-band FDD channels (e.g., n5) maintain robust channel quality during uploads, they exhibit a 70% median Block Error Rate (BLER) during active browsing tests, driving a 36.6% page-load failure rate. Conversely, the dense stadium Wi-Fi infrastructure delivers downlink throughput comparable to the best performing 5G Standalone (SA) deployment while providing better uplink and latency resilience, yielding the lowest game-day page-load failure rate (3.9%) and bounding image upload latency degradation to just 2.1x relative to empty-stadium baselines. These insights proves that densification through localized Wi-Fi deployment is essential to absorb severe stadium traffic spikes.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
uplink gap
dense stadium deployment
QoE characterization
Wi-Fi offloading
cellular congestion
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